Archive for August, 2013

The big news in social media this week was Twitter’s purchase of Trendrr. This is great for Twitter, which acquires great technology just in time for TV’s new season. It is also, I would assume, great for Trendrr. (Congrats, guys!) But for the TV networks, producers, brands and agencies that are all still trying to figure out this thing that is “social TV,” it risks becoming a step backward.

Twitter, just for the record, is awesome. It is a wonderful platform for marketing, listening and sharing, especially with text. The immediacy of the 140 characters, the ability to see and search trends through hashtags, and the personal involvement of many celebrities with their own accounts makes Twitter perfect for real-time reactions around TV.

But as great as Twitter is, it is only one of the platforms that comprise social TV.

We’ve had beer wars, cola wars and, for those who remember, the legendary Macy’s versus Gimbels rivalry. Right now cellphone marketers are exchanging blow after blow. So who are the next combatants from the school of Coke and Pepsi, or Apple and Samsung?

You can expect a lot more head-to-head ad spending from Netflix, Amazon and Hulu.

So far the ascendant streaming services haven’t waged much of an ad war, but that seems likely to change. The subscriber counts and video content of all three are continually growing by leaps and bounds, increasing their competition, costs and potential rewards at a rapid pace. Netflix, which offered about 1,000 movies and TV episodes when it began streaming videos in 2007, now has thousands more for its 29 million US subscribers. Just last week it signed a deal with the Weinstein Co. for exclusive rights to its movies starting in 2016, a pact Harvey Weinstein called “probably the biggest” in the company’s history. One media analyst estimated the cost to Netflix at $30 million — per year.

Facebook is proposing to clarify how it manages user data for advertisements, as part of an agreement stemming from a settlement of a class-action lawsuit.

The company, owner of the world’s largest social-networking service, said today it is working to provide simpler language on how it may use a member’s name, profile picture and other data for ads. Facebook also plans to add a provision that says minors will verify that a parent or guardian has consented to them being part of such ads.

“The goal here is to be very clear with people about how advertising works on Facebook,” said Erin Egan, chief privacy officer for policy.

In an effort to make it easier for networks and publishers to display tweets in their programming, Twitter has bought the social-TV startup Trendrr for an undisclosed sum.

It’s the second major acquisition Twitter has made this year of an ecosystem company that conducted measurement and analytics on behalf of networks and brands around social conversations linked to TV. It reportedly paid $90 million for a former Trendrr competitor, Bluefin Labs, which was acquired in February.

An outage that has brought down The New York Times’ website for some of the site’s users appears to be the result of a “malicious external attack,” according to a Times spokeswoman, cautioning that the assessment was still preliminary.

The Times is working to fix the problem, she said.

The Times website went down around 3:30 p.m. ET in New York and elsewhere, sending people to Twitter to inquire about the outage. Many of the tweets were warmed over jokes from two weeks ago, when the Times experienced its last website outage. It blamed that episode on a regularly scheduled internal update.

Online advertising has not come all that far from those “punch the monkey” banners that littered the early web.

In a nod to web ads’ roots — or else a total disregard for their evolution — The Baltimore Sun’s home page on Monday featured an ad from Maryland merchant Jarvis Appliance that overtook the site with an aesthetic seemingly borrowed from PennySaver.

Changes to the children’s privacy-protection law are keeping kids’ site publishers awake at night. The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act changes went into effect July 1, and since then some mom-and-pop sites providing games and educational resources say their ad revenue has tanked. The rule limits the ability of such sites to track children under age 13, thus preventing them from running behaviorally-targeted ads.

“I’m just like sitting on pins and needles,” said Judy Miller, founder of Apples4TheTeacher, a site featuring thousands of pages of educational resources for teachers and kids. Because it caters to teachers but also attracts children, the former elementary school teacher is unsure how the law affects her site.

“The law is so subjective for what is a kids’ site and what is a mixed site, it just has thrown me into a tailspin,” said Ms. Miller, who recently decided to spend several thousand dollars to have her site audited by privacy-services firm Truste in the hopes of determining how to handle the COPPA changes.